Fulbright College Professor Publishes Book on Social Network Analysis

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Song Yang and the cover of his upcoming book.

FAYETTEVILLE, Ark. – Song Yang, a professor in the Department of Sociology and Criminal Justice in the J. William Fulbright College of Arts and Sciences, has published a book focused on the recording and measuring of social structures using graph and network models.

The book, titled Social Network Analysis: Methods and Examples, offers a clear and comprehensive introduction to the developing world of social network analysis. It provides social science students with the tools to perform their own social network analysis by covering the basic procedural information as well as instructive examples from several fields.

Social network analysis is the study of societal structure and how it connects people and things. The people or agents in the study are called nodes, and the relationships or exchanges between them are called links, ties or edges. The networks being analyzed are often shown through sociograms, where the nodes are shown as points or dots and the links are shown as lines. 

Rather than taking a mathematical approach, Yang and his co-authors, Franziska B. Keller and Lu Zheng, choose to take a conceptual route as they examine the link between what social network analysis methods can offer researchers and how those methods can be used in data collection, research design and analysis. Four chapters of the book provide practical applications as well as examples from work and organizations, crime and terrorism studies, mental and physical health studies and politics.

Yang and his co-authors have received praise from many of his peers for the way Social Network Analysis gives young readers a strong foundation in the study of this field, as well as for the way it explains the concepts and practices of social network analysis with simple and easy to understand examples.

The book is set to be released in November of 2016 by SAGE Publications.